The world's girls: no voice, no rights

How can we address the global threat to women's rights with no
space for girls’ - or even women’s - voices at the UN? How will we design a
post-2015 framework that responds to the needs of the most marginalized?

2015 is a
milestone year that stands at the intersection of several major anniversaries
for human rights and development. Perhaps most visibly, this is the 15th
anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and therefore the year
world leaders will formally close out the Millennium Charter and adopt a new
global development framework. For women and girls, it’s the 20th
anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and its crucial policy
framework, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

One would
think, therefore, that 2015 would be a year in which the global community would
come together and imagine new rights standards that will set lofty goals for
the next generation. Yet so far, this does not seem to be the case. Rather,
global leaders are taking a more cautious - or even overtly conservative - approach
to negotiations on women’s and girls’ rights. Advocates must not only push
governments to set new standards, but must ensure they simply affirm, or worse
still, not lose ground on, old ones.

Deniz
Kandiyoti wrote recently on openDemocracy 50.50 about the transnational
alliances that are working to take “all matters relating to sexuality, to
the control of female bodies, and to reproductive choice” out of the realm of
civic deliberation. “Such is the momentum,” said Kandiyoti “…that the UN failed
to pass a resolution for a Fifth World Conference on Women from fear of the
consequences of re-opening international agreements on women’s rights.”

Indeed,
thanks to the growing trend Kandiyoti describes, this inauspicious Beijing
anniversary year finds advocates headed to the United Nations Commission on the
Status of Women (CSW) next month with a tepid draft outcome
document - and one that will have been pre-negotiated, signed,
sealed and delivered before they have even set foot in the UN complex.

A small point
on process, perhaps, but one worth exploring further: Typically, the CSW
outcome document - the Agreed Conclusion - are negotiated during the course of
the two weeks of Commission meetings. Thousands of feminist activists attend
the CSW, host side events and lobby governments for their particular advocacy
objectives. This year, there are no Agreed Conclusions, and the outcome
document - a “political declaration,” - is being negotiated as we speak, a
month in advance of the meetings. According to some, the decision to
pre-negotiate a political declaration marking the 20th anniversary
of Beijing was an effort to avoid the inevitable conservative backlash against
affirmations of gender equality and female empowerment, an evasive maneuver to
avoid reversing progress.

Sound
familiar? It should. Ann Marie Goetz and Joanne Sandler similarly point out in
their article, Women's
rights have no country, that the same line of thinking led to the ultimate
decision not to mark the 20th anniversary of the ICPD with an
international conference last year, and indeed that many women’s rights
advocates “breathed a sigh of relief when UN Member
States failed to pass a resolution in favour of holding a Fifth World
Conference” for fear of losing momentum on women’s rights.

This is an impossible position for an activist, particularly a
young activist: to have the fire in one’s belly of wanting to push for newer,
better rights standards that build upon those important platforms of Beijing
and Cairo you’ve inherited, yet “knowing better”… knowing, or very strongly
suspecting, that to do so might actually roll back those very rights standards
the community holds dear.

Certainly, it can be conceded, that a pre-negotiated document
might be preferable if it were allowed to not only reaffirm existing standards,
but also imagine new ones. Rights through the back door are still rights, one
could suppose.

But instead, the draft Declaration is a bland document lacking
strong commitments to human rights, to adolescent girls, and to sexual and
reproductive rights, among others. The pre-negotiated nature means the whole
affair will be settled well before the thousands of activists who go to great
trouble and expense to travel to New York from all over the world have arrived.
It is then left to only those groups with permanent representation in New York
- many of which, thank goodness, are strong and inclusive coalition leaders who
funnel information and engagement opportunities back and forth to the global
sisterhood with incredible speed and efficiency - to represent our global
interests, in the ever-winnowing space that they have to
do so.

For no
population is there a greater risk of being left off the agenda entirely, even
after a year when global attention to them has arguably been at its highest
(see Malala’s Peace Prize), than adolescent girls. At the first reading of the draft Declaration, which took
place at the UN on 29 January, one government representative stated that
Beijing did not address girls and therefore neither should the CSW review. The
official had clearly overlooked the final critical area, part L, on “The Girl
Child,” where governments explicitly asserted girls’ human rights to live free
of abuse, discrimination, forced marriage and other harmful traditional
practices, the current draft is noticeably deficient in attention to the
specific rights, needs and assets of girls.

This comes on
the heels of similar developments in the post-2015 process. Late last year, the
Secretary General released a much-anticipated report outlining
his proposed framework for the post-2015, sustainable development agenda. It left much to be
desired. Absent was a call for a stand-alone gender goal (though he
did endorse the Open Working Group’s draft framework as a starting-point for
negotiations). His report, too, lacked any reference to adolescent girls, who
decades of research shows, are an important element of any effort to alleviate
poverty. ICRW’s research has shown
that when girls are treated equally at home and in public, they feel safer in
school and are more likely to continue their education, which leads to more
informed citizens, workers, souses and parents who can contribute to
sustainable development. In Bangladesh, Egypt,
Ethiopia and India has further demonstrated the importance of
empowering girls to change discriminatory knowledge, attitudes and practices - all
of which was called for in Beijing, and that girl-focused programs expand
girls’ ability to make strategic life choices by providing them with access to
critical resources. It was as true in Beijing in 1995 as it is now: the global
community must invest in girls themselves, in proven approaches that empower
them to be agents of change.

Yet instead,
in this important anniversary year, the community of feminist and girl
advocates finds the global debate at the intersection of fundamentally
important rights and development policy processes that make no room for their
participation and hence, unsurprisingly, make no mention of their rights and
needs. How will we build on Beijing with no
space for girls’ - or even women’s - voices at the UN? How will we design a
post-2015 framework that responds to our needs without articulating goals and
targets designed to advance the most marginalized?

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